- Narration: Scott Alford reads it rather than the author, so a first-person memoir reaches you in a voice that is not its owner's.
- Themes: Mar-a-Lago and a town remade, race relations in Palm Beach, municipal politics, local crime
- Mood: Combative and conversational
- Verdict: Valuable as a local witness account, openly partisan as an argument, and short enough to try.
How much can a local commissioner tell you about a president? That is the proposition behind this audiobook, and it is narrower and more interesting than the title suggests. Dr. Joseph Della-Giustina served as a commissioner in Palm Beach, Florida, when Donald Trump bought Mar-a-Lago in the 1980s, and the book's claim is proximity: someone who crossed paths with the man repeatedly, in a town that purchase reorganized. What the copy promises is not a political biography but an account of what happened to one wealthy municipality afterward, to its economy and its race relations, alongside a run of trials, killings and betrayals the description says came with the change.
Widen Your Window of Opinion, One Reviewer Says
The title and the contents are pulling in different directions, and a buyer should know that before committing. Trump and Racism announces a thesis about a national figure and a national failing. The description underneath it describes something more local and, frankly, more unusual: what a resident official watched happen to Palm Beach across four decades, told through incidents rather than through argument. The copy itself insists the book goes beyond being just a memoir and promises hidden historical truths, which is the sort of claim that raises expectations a four-hour and forty-six minute recording cannot always meet. What it can deliver is testimony from a seat almost nobody else occupied.
Displayed first in the column, an October 2024 five-star catches the discrepancy without treating it as a flaw. That entry notes the book is not only about Trump and racial discrimination, since the author spends real time on Palm Beach life itself, and then addresses the criticism head on: some readers call it a one-sided argument, while this one prefers to call it constructive criticism and argues that people should widen their window of opinion. Both halves of that assessment are accurate. The book is partisan, and it is also more textured than a polemic.
A Hired Voice Says I for a Living Man
Crime writing is the strongest material, judging by the column. A five-star from October 7, 2024 compares the experience to a roller coaster and singles out the way the author recounts the murder cases, arguing that they expose a side of Palm Beach kept out of view for years. That is where a local official has an unfair advantage over a national journalist. Municipal records, courtroom days, the names everyone in town knew and nobody printed: none of it requires access to a president, and all of it is the sort of detail that gives a place its actual history.
Production is where the record gets quiet. Scott Alford is credited with reading a first-person memoir written by its subject, on a title the publisher field shows as self-issued under the author's own name, which means a hired voice says I throughout on behalf of a man still living. That is a defensible choice and a slightly strange one. Not a single response among the forty-four ratings and five written entries says anything about how the recording turned out, so a buyer weighing the audio edition specifically is working from the credit line and nothing else.
Enthusiasm From Seventeen Months Before This Release
Dissent in the column is brief and blunt. A one-star filed on August 27, 2025 calls the book right-wing propaganda, warns readers not to be fooled, and adds that the Republican party before Trump was not what the current movement has become. Nothing else on the page answers that charge. The title is published by the author under his own name, so no imprint, editor or series apparatus stands between the argument and whoever hears it, and the description makes its claim about uncovering hidden historical truths without a source note, citation or bibliography anywhere in sight. On a subject this contested, the absence of an editorial layer is itself information a buyer should weigh.
The shape of the column deserves scrutiny too. Four of the five displayed responses were filed on October 6 and 7, 2024, all of them five stars, and two of them reach for nearly the same phrase about being kept entertained throughout. A two-day burst of near-identical praise behaves differently from a column built up over years, and it sits under a release date of March 2026, roughly seventeen months later, so none of that enthusiasm was written about this recording. The badge reads 4.4 across forty-four ratings while the five visible entries average lower than that, which means the votes you cannot read are doing most of the work.
Skeptical Going In, Entertained Coming Out
A different October 2024 five-star describes the most productive way to approach it. That reader came in skeptical, found the book motivating enough to provoke thought and to leave real doubt behind, and finished it entertained while stating outright a disagreement with the one-sided arguments the author presents. Reading against a book and finishing it anyway is a specific skill, and this title rewards it. At under five hours the investment is small, and the local material is genuinely hard to find elsewhere, whatever you make of the framing around it.
Worth a listen for people interested in Palm Beach as a place, in how one property purchase can reshape a small municipality, and for anyone who collects firsthand accounts from officials who were in the room. Not worth it for listeners looking for a documented investigation of Trump's record on race, since this is memoir and opinion rather than reporting, nor for anyone hoping for a balanced survey. The book is a witness statement from a partisan witness, offered in under five hours, and it is most useful to whoever reads it that way.
Is this audiobook a biography of Donald Trump?
No. It is a memoir by a former Palm Beach commissioner who encountered Trump repeatedly after the Mar-a-Lago purchase, and the copy states the book goes beyond memoir into local history. The record files it under both biography and politics, which suits a book that is mostly about a town.
Does the audiobook take a side, and do reviewers agree that it does?
It takes a side, and even favorable responses concede as much. One five-star reports that the author's perspective did not fully convince it about Trump's controversies, while still crediting the book with knowing how to keep readers hooked. Expect advocacy rather than a survey, and judge the local detail on its own terms.
